The Campus Art Museum - Samuel H. Kress Foundation

members often see the campus art museum as a place to take family or friends, as
witness these testimonies:
When I have visitors… it is the first place I take them in Oberlin because it’s
the thing we are really proud of and that’s why I agreed to volunteer at the
museum to do whatever I could to make sure that it continues. (community
member, Oberlin College)
There’s something called Junior Parent Weekend and juniors invite their parents
to campus for the weekend to let them know what’s going on on campus, to
kind of show off what’s going on. And we notice a big uptake in student
visitors to the museum. They bring their parents to the museum. (museum staff,
University of Notre Dame)
I feel like I evangelize when I’m in the museum. I tend to bring everyone here.
If someone wants to meet up for coffee or something, I say, “Hey, we should
just go to the art museum because it’s free”…. I’ve met blind dates here because
it’s a safe space and the guards know me.... I bring my family every time they
come to town. (student, University of Kansas)
Students working at the museum talked about getting their friends there,
sometimes to see an exhibit, sometimes to help them prepare for an event:
When I started as a docent, I would take my friends here and practiced on
them, give them the tours, and they were like, “Wow, if you had never brought
me here I wouldn’t have ever come”. (student, Indiana University)
Five of the museums have small gift shops, but they do not appear to attract
visitors to the museum. I observed few people in the gift shops other than one
that was part of a lively café. An administrative assistant at one museum told me
that with the downturn in the economy, people are not buying things at the shop
and that the museum has to stock only relatively inexpensive items. The director
at another museum said that they used to have a gift shop, but closed it to make a
gallery space for works on paper. Since space is at a premium at all of the museums,
this may be useful advice for some of those still hanging onto shops.
The museum is thus a venue that some people seek out and make frequent
use of, taking others with them from time to time. Nonetheless, museum personnel
and students on all of the campuses talked about the challenge of getting students
and faculty, particularly those in disciplines other than the arts, to come to the
museum. Students sometimes mentioned that other students do not even know
where the museum is located. Indeed, this is true. I wandered across two of the
large campuses in the study asking directions to the art museum and received
perplexed responses. Museum staff, student groups associated with the museum,
and community associations such as Friends of the Museum all work to create and
host social events to attract others to the campus art museum and to make the
spaces better known and used.
How to Get Them in the Door: Interacting with the Art Museum Outside of Classes
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